Standing on the corner in a quiet subdivision a blue Chevrolet from the mid 1960’s passes by.  I try to move my feet and explore my surroundings but I can’t,  I’m not really there.  I am having what is called a “Lucid Dream” where I know I am dreaming while still within the dream.

Back, during a period of my life when I worked night shift and would get home in the morning with just an hour of spare time before I had to go out again is when it happened most.  I would lye on the bed, on top of the covers, with my cloths on.  With diffuse sunlight illuminating the room and knowing I only had just an hour to sleep, I would frequently have a lucid dream.  On rare occasion I would be lucid before the dream started.  When this happened I would see a series of images from my memory and thoughts appearing like flash cards, my brain would pick out one or more that seem to stand out and that would become the subject of the dream.  Like a spectator, I never seemed to have control of anything while in the dream except the ability to wake myself up and know that I was dreaming.

Could dreams be an electrical rebalancing of the brain?

Science has shown that our brains work by electrical pulses between neurons.  If we apply what we know about how electricity works outside our body, as we use our brain it should cause a build up of positively charged areas.  Perhaps one of the reasons for sleep is to rebalance these electrical charges.  As the neurons rebalance these electrical movements could trigger flash card type images during sleep.  As the images flash, a still active part of the brain unaware we are sleeping treats them as reality and try’s to make sense of them.  It is this process that seems to start the dream.

In the diagram of the brain below the green dots represent negatively charged areas and the a red dots show positive charged areas resulting from electrical neuron activity at the end of a busy day.

After a good nights sleep the brain becomes electrically balanced again. As the red dots representing positively charged areas move back to an equilibrium position through the night (as shown in the diagram below) they trigger images that become the basis of dreams.

Expanding on this theory it could explain other things such as how after hours of trying to solve a particular problem its sometimes better and easier to figure out if we leave it until morning.  Hours of neurons firing in the same area of the brain could build up such a charge that it makes the thought process more difficult and less effective.  If the brain does rebalance these charges during sleep they should take a path of least resistance to equalize that might not always be the path they took to get there.   This would sometimes cause us to dream about what happened though the day and at times trigger an old or unrelated memory in between charged areas.

Whether necessary for some biological function or just random firing of neurons dreams continue to be an unsolved mystery.

Dave Lister

listerlogic.com